A critical aspect of computer software development is quality assurance. For a given software project different types of testing may be appropriate, and different tools are available to assist in the testing process.
Code coverage (or test coverage) tools are one type of tool available to assist with software testing. Generally speaking, a code coverage tool is used to determine what parts of source code are covered by a given test suite and what (if any) parts of source code are not.
Complex software products can involve hundreds of thousands (or even millions) of lines of code spread across tens or hundreds of thousands of source code files. For such software products, the result set of a code coverage analysis can be large and require significant storage resources to store for review by relevant stakeholders.
This storage issue is further exacerbated in cases where code coverage analysis is repetitively performed as a source code base changes over time—e.g. each time revised source code is committed to the base in order to fix an issue or provide a new feature. In cases such as this each code coverage analysis performed generates a new set of code coverage results that need to be stored.
The approaches described in this section are approaches that are known to the inventors and could be pursued. They are not necessarily approaches that have been pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section, or that those approaches are known to a person of ordinary skill in the art.